Everyone my age remembers information technology (IT) lessons at school as an absolute joke.

Forty minutes of our precious young lives each week were wasted by a clueless teacher reading off a sheet in a bid to help us ‘learn’ how to use a spreadsheet or word document.

Little did they seem to realise that every night we were going home, hijacking our parents’ computers and surfing the very primitive 'World Wide Web' using a noisy and cantankerous dial-up system. We already knew how to do everything we were supposedly being ‘taught’ with our eyes shut.

In short, the IT or information and communications technology (ICT) curriculum, as it called today, was not considered a proper subject by either the teacher or pupils.

And considering my school was a highly competitive and academically demanding institution in all other subject areas, it was the only topic which remained a joke during my seven years of secondary school education.

British kids need to learn how to code if the UK is to ever produce the next Mark Zuckerberg who can create products such as Facebook.

I dread to think what ICT lessons must be like for technology-savvy kids today who are all armed with smartphones.

As with every topic, teachers should be trying to make the subjects they teach at school connect with real life opportunities.

This is why it is also brilliant to hear that Gove will be working with the technology industry and universities to create the next generation ‘open source’ IT school curriculum.

Not enough British children know the amazing opportunities computer science can hold because the teaching of it in schools has sucked the life out it for too long.

We need to teach kids to how code so they can create the apps, websites and video games of the future, which have affected this generation of children as much as American exports, Twitter, Facebook and Google have done.